- RT @iknow_uk: Natural History #Museum, South Kensington, #London http://bit.ly/11QP1a and the original pre-ironed! http://is.gd/ZbG0 #
- Daily Buzz:: london is having a tube train strike and the dutch exam failure is causing some sunny talks… isn't twitter weird! #
- RT @iknow_uk: Picture of the day: Nymans Gardens, National Trust Mid Sussex http://bit.ly/wxeS5 and my take! http://tinyurl.com/lyclud #
- Wants a new iphone! #
- Wondering why things that are meant to be clever aren't #
- What's happened to the weather ? Tornado looms over Bude, #Cornwall, as wild weather hits the Southwest http://bit.ly/xoX1y via @iknow_Uk #
- Looking forward to the apprentice .. and making tea 😛 #
Natural History Museum Picture unfurled
Iknow Uk seem to have found an ancient picture of the Natural History Museum in London. Â Located at http://www.flickr.com/photos/iknow-uk/3600512285/in/set-72157619251872997/
The flickr account appears to have a revamped picture – however exclusively here is the original – before it got ironed flat!
A little play with some picture work :)
Saw this on iknow-uk’s flickr account today : Â http://www.flickr.com/photos/iknow-uk/3573803284/in/set-72157618835887949/
And since it’s a nice picture I thought I would touch it up a little bit with a couple of programs – so after tweaking I applied a filter to make it look like a watercolour 🙂  And here it is 🙂  Nyman Gardens almost as if I painted it myself!
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-07
- getting annoyed at spammers trying to send spam via the company sites – go away you aren’t getting in stop annoying me! #
- New Blog up for http://www.delicatedreams.co.uk – view it on . The start of more regular blogs! #
- Wondering why ubuntu doesn’t like his 5 yr old laptop – I want to ditch windows on it! #
- See our pictures, from preparing the #NationalBusinessAwards finalist presentation to the presentation, http://bit.ly/hmvah (via @iknow_uk) #
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Anti-Spam on servers…
After several years of running different solutions on different servers I have found that ASSP is one of the best anti-spam solutions around.
However – after some time it still struggles and gets weaker, can anyone recommend any other systems that can work ALONGSIDE it (not replace).
Loss of title bar / close , minimise and maximise buttons in ubuntu
A few weeks ago I upgraded ubuntu to Gutsy Gibbon – I was very impressed, the enhanced graphics which were not available to me in feisty now worked.
However somehow last week I lost my title bar, so no window title, no minimise or maximise button and the close button was gone. In addition the terminal window was now broken loading up a blank page.
After trawling through various forums and trying half a dozen fixes, with no success I finally tried turning off the special effects, and now have them back.
It’s a bit frustrating, I can only assume that one of the regular updates broke the driver that was working for me previously as no settings had been changed. Ah well – anyone with this problem, it’s really not worth the hassle just to have windows that wobble when moved and desktops that slide when changed 🙂
Cats continued
Well after a few months – I thought I would update everyone about the Lion Poo story.
Basically applied it after getting annoyed at cats using the garden as a toilet, harem and anything else they wanted. At first we didn’t see much of a change, however by the time 3 days had past we still saw the same number of cats… except they didn’t stop – they just walked through, no more poo, no more fighting etc…
Just over a month afterwards – this was still the case, now around 2 months afterwards the cats are starting to come back – but all in all this Lion Poo stuff does work! Would have expected it to keep cats away in total – however just stopping them using our “facilities” is good enough for me!
Backup Backup Backup
An incident earlier this week has made me review the backup systems in place for my wifes company (www.ihelm-enterprises.co.uk).
One of our clients doesn’t exclusively use us and so had a problem when another host lost a server and had no backups – the client also doesn’t backup frequently and had hoped that the server hosts would have some form of backup – but of course they didn’t.
We have always been a bit unusual in that we have routinely done backups – however we don’t do them every day and they do frequently fail – as we have a mixture of servers we had a rather un-orthodox way of doing them.
Server 1 performed its backup by transferring to Server2
Server 2 then transferred server 1 and server 2’s backup to the next server etc… until the final resting place was a repository where only the final server could get teh files – this was backed up by a 3rd party regularly.
However after hearing of our clients problems I thought I would try our system to see if we could easily recover – and found that
a) our repository was full and I hadn’t had any notification of this.
b) geting the files off was extremely difficult as some of the files are very large and the server will access to the repository didn’t have a lot of space…
c) Â Some of the servers have not been notifying me of messages encountered during the backup so no idea of the files were complete or not.
So decided to re-think this a bit.
Now our servers transmit to our office computers – one of which is on 24hrs – this then uses windows file sharing (despite it being a linux computer 🙂 ) to copy the files over to a new NAS which is located somewhere the office.
We have already seen some benefits from this – we can easily see what files are on the NAS & restoring is simple, also each server has a set time to transfer its files – so any problems we only need to look at that server and re-run specific backups.
The bottom line is – if you do provide backups or just to backup your own work – do check your backup system every now and again – ours had been in place over a year after the previous model was un-doable with the adsl we had at the time – but since then the cheapness of Network Attached Storage devices has meant we can affordably implement this as well.
Backup – Backup – Backup – Check – Review – Backup – Backup – Backup – Check – Review, this is now my new mantra!
Big Cat vs Small Cat
In our new house we have had a problem with cats – in the back garden to be precise.
Basically the previous owners didn’t care about the back & left it grow wild for around five years and all the local cats got very used to using the back garden as a litter tray.
After clearing the weeds it’s now a case of how to stop them from returning – we have plans for some smelling plants etc.. but they won’t be done until next year at the earliest – however we think the solution is in hand.
Basically you can now buy Lion Poo from various online stores – this is actually pellets with the scent/essence in them rather than the real stuff. Â It was delivered today – going to wait to apply it until the weather gets a bit better and I am a bit more mobile.
Hopefully this will work – if so then maybe the next step is to buy a lion… Â Has anyone else tried this successfully or is anyone remotely intrested in knowing if it worked? If so check back here in a month or so when I should have posted an update.
Ubuntu as home desktop…
For three months now I have used Ubuntu as the operating system of choice replacing windows XP on my home computer.
For the most part the transition was quite easy and it’s clear why people are begining to talk about it being able to replace windows for some users.
But there is of couse always a but – and this is a major one for me. Â Linux and Ubuntu in particular allows you to easily install programs that are compatible with your particular flavour – e.g. Adept installer, synaptic installer or command line utilities such as apt-get etc…
However one problem I have repeatedly come across is I install a program to find that it doesn’t work – generally due to hardware issues on my aging computer – such as low 3d memory etc.. Â In windows -t his is not normally a problem, but generally programs will test and warn you they are incompatible, however in ubuntu and Linux in general these progams let you install them and then fail.
The odd thing in the “old” days of using just command line usually programs would fail to compile and therefore install if any problems were encountered – however this robustness seems to have been lost in the drive to give the impression that the system can run more programs than they can.
However all said and done Ubuntu is generally good – I would imagine that given a few more releases it will really be able to take off – especially if more people use it with Dell’s new offerings giving more feedback to the developers.
So please someone just make it so I can’t install something that won’t work!